One of the challenges of modern crystallography of complex systems (complex metallic alloys, proteins, aperiodic crystals and quasicrystals) is to properly describe the disorder in these systems and discuss correctly the refinement results in terms of the structural disorder. In this paper we briefly discuss a new approach to phasons and phonons in quasicrystals and focus on the new theory of phonons in these materials. A newly derived correction factor for phonons in the form of the Bessel function is the approximated way of describing optic modes in the phonon spectra of quasicrystals. It is applied to a real decagonal quasicrystal in the Al-Cu-Rh system with 56/38 atoms per thick/thin structural unit, based on 2092 unique reflections selected from the collected diffraction data, significantly improving the refinement results. The final R-factor value is 7.24%, which is over 0.5% better result comparing to originally reported. We believe our work will open a broader discussion on the disorder in quasicrystals (and other aperiodic systems) and motivate to develop new approaches to treat the diffraction data influenced by different types of disorder in the new way.
We investigate the light-current-voltage characteristics and emission spectra of 2.3 THz quantum cascade laser operating in the negative differential resistance (NDR) region. It was shown that the formation of electric field domains (EFDs) leads to a large number of discontinuities on the current-voltage and the total optical power on current characteristics. Measurements of emission spectra at different current (before the NDR region and in the NDR region) shows that the formation of EFDs results in decrease of the output intensity, but does not influence on Fabry-Perot multi-mode structure of THz QCL. The developed theoretical model predicts the formation of EFDs in the NDR region and qualitatively explain the experimental results.